House of Finwë family tree, based on the later version from HoME. I chose to stop at Elrond & Elros' generation, but later added Arwen as a side note, which is why her brothers are not included.

girl crush (part 3)

But none of the many objects of my adolescent (and then teenage) obsessions were quite so untouchable as Celeste. With her, it was different — I didn’t long desperately to be her friend, but was content with gazing up, from a distance, to the pedestal I had set her upon.

I never knew her personally; I only knew of her, and that was enough. In school she was one of the lead Chinese dancers, and at every Chinese New Year or Teacher’s Day (or whatever uninspired drag of a special occasion’s) performance, the curtains rose on her standing front and centre. When the other girls filed off into the wings, she would emerge from the riff-raff, upstage in the spotlight, regal and delicately arranged like a flower as she remained on stage waiting to begin her solo; the calefare having dutifully made way for their star. Everyone knew who she was. She was Ding Laoshi, the Chinese dance instructor’s, favourite; I once heard from a friend that Ding Laoshi referred to her as “小公主” - little princess - and it was obvious why. When she danced, in her long graceful lines and winsome smile was a dramatic air of triumph and tragedy combined, femininity glorified and yet reproached. She was all vulnerable charm and earnest strength. I could never tear my eyes away from her when she was onstage.

Offstage, she was steeped in a mist of mystery.

But first, a description: she was tall and lithe, with a long neck and expressive fingers, no curves to speak of. A golden-brown, sharp-jawed face with full lips and fierce, dark eyebrows; large almond eyes that were challenging and secretive at the same time; long lifted cheeks that gave her face a sense of yearning openness. To this day, I am still of the opinion that no one’s features came together as alluringly, as perfectly exotically, as hers did (which I suppose already explains my untiring fascination — as you might know, I am too easily mesmerised by all things beautiful).

In real life, she carried herself in a self-conscious, tentative manner that made her seem more fragile than her strong limbs and powerful technique on stage betrayed; her shoulders were slightly hunched, accentuating jutting collarbones, and her hands always carefully held in front of her body (I knew this from passing by her in the corridors, or spotting her from afar in the canteen). On Instagram, for she was one of those people who lived their lives on Instagram, she regularly posted dimly-lit close-ups of herself looking vacantly into the camera, lips parted so a flash of white teeth showed through, and captioned these photos with melancholy and cryptic poetry. She was too thin, and her gaze a tad too raw, to be considered sexy — but she was endlessly sensual.

She was not just a talented dancer, but also a gifted artist. A painter and sketcher, one of her favourite canvases was herself — she experimented with wild lipstick colours and stunning, deftly-blended eyeshadow creations that would not have looked out of place on a runway. She was equally bold and varied with her fashion choices: from heavy maxi skirts and boots (in Singapore weather!) paired with skimpy tank tops, to baggy men’s shirts and oversized pants and aviators, to clashing colours and unyielding eclecticism of pattern layered unabashedly on pattern, to slinky evening gowns fit for a red carpet, to girlish blogshop chic… she pulled it all off seamlessly. Her style was the sum of all styles, her great skill that of metamorphosis. A chameleon of a girl, flitting from one look to another.

Fittingly, these artistic inclinations were accompanied by failing grades in math and science. Even her name suited her perfectly. Celeste - elegant, ethereal, poetic. Unique but not blatantly so. Anything else would have been too coarse, too common, trying too hard. But not everything about her was so deeply-passionate and dramatic: like any other teenage girl (here is a reminder that we were merely sixteen at the time), she posted cheery OOTDs, and food photos, and group snaps where she was grinning so wide that her eyes were tiny and all her teeth showed — those were my favourite photos, the ones where she looked gloriously happy. Tortured artist perhaps, but there was joy in her life, I was sure. This only served to further my obsession. I marvelled at how such a pensive, complex being could also be so purely exuberant and vital — it was precisely this polarity that mesmerised me. The capacity for feeling that she appeared to possess (deep plunges into depression, lofty heights of euphoria) was too far removed from my own petty anxieties and common joys for comprehension; she eluded understanding. I wondered how she had grown into this identity, what thoughts went through her mind, how much of what I saw was real. Her entire personality seemed like a dream.

I’m well aware that I’m manic pixie dream girl-ing her from start to finish; even back then I knew very well that the Celeste-construction in my head was merely my selective interpretation of what she projected to the world. But I reasoned that it was harmless, since it was all in my head. What makes me feel more guilty, is that I know the current, 2020 Celeste would likely be horrified if she ever stumbled across this. Her and her great struggle with being looked at and evaluated, her impassioned revolts against the unforgiving bounds of beauty. What violation would she feel if she saw me picking her apart, analysing her younger self in such excruciating detail? (On the other hand… perhaps the exhibitionist in her would enjoy the attention. I don’t know - I never properly knew her and I still don’t.) Now I recognise that she struggled intensely back then with body image and self-esteem and mental health in general — but at the time I knew only to be entranced, not empathetic.  

When I step back and look at it, actually, it’s strange the manner in which I viewed her. Because in a school as small as ours, I had many friends who knew her personally. I mean, we were in the same damn school — she wasn’t that far off at all. Also, it wasn’t precisely a secret that I thought she was cool, because she was sure to come up in rabid gossip sessions; she was considered “high profile” in our school, and in my defence, I wasn’t the only one who pondered and speculated about her life and her relationships (she briefly dated a boy in our level, a well-muscled good-looking jock-type, who was as obscenely rich and distastefully boyish as one could get — it perplexed me how someone like her could be attracted to someone like him — but that’s a story for another time).

A friend, Gina, once interrupted me when I mentioned Celeste’s unblemished complexion (while bemoaning my own persistent outbreaks) — “Celeste? No way. Her skin is quite bad leh.” Gina, always flippant and unabashed, and who was a classmate of Celeste’s, seemed keen to correct me. “She has a lot of pimples on her forehead. But in photos you can’t tell because of the concealer.” I took this in for a second, with brief wonderment. With just that, she had inched closer to reality.

The last degree of separation between us dissipated come year 1 of junior college, when we ended up in the same H1 Chinese class. It was a small class, only 7 students, all of us having had failed our Chinese O-Levels (haha). She sat at one side of the classroom with her classmates, and I sat at the other with mine. Our two groups didn’t mix, and there was no need to. No one really listened or participated in class anyway. It was H1 Chinese. By that time I was no longer as enamoured of her as I’d previously been, but it was still a thrill to be in the same room, to listen to her reply Chen Laoshi (a grumbling man of retirement age, balding and constantly sweating or complaining about the school management) in stilted mandarin when called upon. Her voice was husky, sounding like it did in the acoustic covers she posted online (by then she had added singing to her repertoire of talents).

One lesson, Chen Laoshi, exasperated by our unresponsiveness, shuffled us around and made us discuss a news article. I ended up paired with Celeste — we exchanged awkward smiles before going about perusing the passage in silence. All of a sudden, I felt distinctly embarrassed to be in her presence. I became conscious of how the waistband of my skirt dug into my stomach, and how my blouse was sack-like and sloppy, and the way baby hairs sprung straight upwards from my hairline no matter how I tried to pin them down. I squirmed internally considering the unattractive largeness of my round, sweaty face next to her fine-boned features. She was, and I was sure of it in that instant, too pretty not to be cruel. But when she finally spoke (in English) to ask me what the last sentence of the article meant — her voice, though American-accented, had an undoubtedly Singaporean accent. She had seemed so beyond my ken, but when the words “lah” and “leh” came out of her mouth, I was shocked to realise that somehow she was just another girl. Illusion dispelled — I gathered myself, and replied that I thought it was trying to say that, despite seeming advances in Singapore’s conservation practices, there was still a long way to go before the nation as a whole really embraced the spirit of sustainability.  

(this is so fucking long I’m dying omg kjfhafhalsf I have no idea how to end this. how did what I intended to be a brief character sketch turn into such a sprawling mess…. but still posting it NOW bc I just want to be done with it lmao. TO BE EDITED/COMPLETED, mayhaps)

(27.01.20)